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The Power of a 'Project Beard' and Other Office Rituals

Rituals are widely used by sports figures to aid performance, and many employers and employees use rituals at work. Sue Shellenbarger and Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School associate professor, discuss. Photo: AP.

Rituals are common among gamblers and sports figures, from wearing a lucky shirt to blowing on dice to counting dribbles before a free throw.

Now researchers are finding that rituals help on the job too. People who engage in ritualistic behavior before a difficult task are less anxious, get more involved and tend to perform better than people who didn't have a ritual, according to research at Harvard Business School, the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management and other universities.

Before sealing a deal employees at Minneapolis-based staffing firm Salo use office rituals including a 'pinkie five,' seen here between Amy Langer and Gwen Martin.
Tim Gruber for The Wall Street Journal

People tend to believe intuitively in the value of rituals—repetitive, symbolic behaviors that aren't motivated by reason and lack a particular goal or outcome, studies show. Nearly half of 400 people surveyed online recently by Harvard researchers said they engage in ritualistic behavior before performing a task that makes them anxious, says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. One participant wrote that, before going to work or stepping into a meeting, he tries "to remove any negative energies" by pounding his feet on the ground several times and shaking his body.

Once a deal is done, employees ring an office gong.
Tim Gruber for The Wall Street Journal

Salo LLC, a financial and human-resources staffing company in Minneapolis, incorporates rituals throughout its work cycle. When customer requests come in, they are posted on a wall-size whiteboard, and can only be recorded, altered or erased by the salesperson who landed the client. "That's their graffiti, their mark. You wouldn't alter someone else's graffiti. It would be bad luck," says Salo Managing Director Gwen Martin.

The whiteboards, visible to entire work teams, serve as "a center hub of activity," says Adam Sprecher, another managing director. When a new name goes up, "there's a little anxiety, of 'OK, here we go! Now it's time to perform.' It's an adrenaline rush," he says. Jobs are listed in black marker, then updated in blue or orange as candidates are added or eliminated. A red check mark means it is time to start thinking about new ideas.

Some teams, including the one Erik Voge and Adam Sprecher are part of, celebrate with a chest bump.
Tim Gruber for The Wall Street Journal

With teams in an office, rituals learned and performed as a group "make them feel closer and more connected"—and tend to boost team performance—says Michael I. Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of several studies on the topic. One possible reason: Such rituals tend to increase people's interest and involvement, according to a recent study co-written by Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Gino and others.

Salo employees prod transactions along with another ritual: "When we are about to lock a deal down, it's bad luck to high-five each other, because you might jinx it," Ms. Martin says. "So you do a 'pinkie-five' instead," tapping pinkie fingers.

Once a deal is done, the salesperson rings a big brass gong on a bank of files in the center of the office. "People get up and cheer and clap," says Kelly Weight, a business development director. Other teams in the company have their own celebration rituals, such as chest bumps or victory dances.

At its Folsom, Calif., offices, chipmaker Intel hosts a red-carpet ceremony for new hires.
Leroy Tripette

Such effusive office practices might invite eye-rolling from some newcomers. One marketing manager, Maureen Sullivan, says that after being initially surprised when she saw colleagues chest-bumping, she thought, "Alrighty, that's what we do here. We just really get into it."

While some rituals are mere superstitions, with little bearing on performance, researchers say others add value by boosting confidence. Researchers asked participants in a recent study to perform a difficult task—either solving math problems or singing in a Wii game—as if they were being evaluated. Some were asked to first engage in a ritual invented by the researchers: make a drawing showing how they were feeling, sprinkle salt on the drawing, count to 10 five times, then crumple it up, says Dr. Gino. The ritual group performed better than controls and posted smaller increases in heart rate.

"Knowing they are performing a ritual puts them in a mind-set of lowering anxiety and feeling more confident," she says.

Ritual videogaming boosts confidence among employees at Bearded, a Pittsburgh Web-design and development firm. When a key employee quit last year to take another job in Silicon Valley, "we were all a little nervous, wondering, 'Could we do it without him?' " says founder Matt Griffin. But employees continued a late-afternoon ritual, playing a tough videogame together for a few minutes. When "we beat this level we'd been striving for, and we did it without" the departed colleague, Mr. Griffin says, they concluded, "we're still a good team."

To speed up work on a stalled music-website project, Tony Kimberly and Matt Bernier, co-founders of a Kansas City, Kan., Web-development company called Spotted Koi, cooked up a ritual—vowing not to shave or cut their hair until they finished. In the next 2½ months, Mr. Bernier, who usually wears his hair cut short, says "I looked like I had lived on the streets for a couple of years."

Work & Family Mailbox

Mr. Kimberly says his project beard was "tremendously itchy" with a "strange-looking" combination of brown and red hair. A few weeks into the ritual, his girlfriend asked, "So, when is this over?" The social pressure and his dislike for his beard "gave us motivation," he says. They finished the project and later repeated the ritual on another new product.

Group rituals can fall flat, however, if employees see them as phony or paternalistic. "One of the worst things you can do is come up with something that has employees rolling their eyes, thinking it's cheesy," says Michael Kerr, a Calgary, Alberta, workplace trainer and speaker on using humor at work.

Sometimes, they can create unintended problems. Mr. Kerr says the CEO of a manufacturing company he worked with had organized a playful holiday ritual, with one employee dressing in a monkey costume, hiding in a box and jumping out to frighten co-workers—whose reactions were videotaped for a holiday party. The company says an employee with a previous heart condition had to be given advance warning and left out of the ritual.

Intel Corp.
is trying out a new ritual at some sites, hosting an Oscar-like red-carpet ceremony for new hires, says Connie Sanchez, who oversees new employee orientation. Incoming employees at the chipmaker's Folsom, Calif., offices Monday were told they were going to lunch at an employee cafe, then led to a red carpet lined with in-house paparazzi and co-workers shooting flash photos. "We wanted to infuse some energy and excitement" into new hires' first day, says Ms. Sanchez. "We decided, 'Let's make them feel like rock stars.' "